Yet in his title he also suggests that there is reason to struggle and to hope. Through the alternating voices of a group of young African intellectuals, journalists and writers, Achebe dramatises the cycles of idealism, disillusion and corruption that often come with the aftermath of revolution. The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.'Īnthills of the Savannah is set in a fictional African country called Kangan, after its liberation in the 1960s. He was inspired by Joyce, took his title from Yeats's The Second Coming and alluded to Conrad in the ironic conclusion to Things Fall Apart, when the British district commissioner thinks about writing his own account of bringing civilisation to Africa: 'He had already chosen the title of the book. Moreover, despite writing to protest racist portraits of Africa as the heart of darkness, Achebe always placed himself as an artist, as an inheritor of the great traditions of western modernism.

I went out of my way to gather all the negative things, to describe them as I think they were - good and bad. As Achebe said in an interview, he was determined not to 'make this story look nicer than it was.

He shows its superstitions and cruelties and makes Okonkwo a complex human being, not a saintly martyr. But what makes Things Fall Apart aesthetically and intellectually memorable, as well as politically important, is Achebe's refusal to simplify or romanticise Ibo culture. Achebe's protagonist, the 'strong man' Okonkwo, is a tragic hero whose death represents the destruction of Ibo culture through the coming of Christian missionaries and British law.

Achebe books